This forum doesn't appear to have a dedicated debate board, so I'd like to start one here, if that's okay with everyone. I'm sure most people have heard the age-old philosophical question, "If a tree falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it, does it make a noise?"

I'd like to take that a step further, to ask your views on whether anything truly exists if nobody believes in it. Take a normal kitchen table, for instance. If everybody - from the tree who supplied the wood, to the carpenter who cut it, to the craftsman who built the table, to the family who now owns it - completely disbelieved in the table's existence, would it still be around?

The Idealism school of thought (that's the belief-determines-existence group) has often been ridiculed by popular thought, but with modern quantum physics and superstring theory, it's starting to seem like they might've been right all along. Their opponents, the Objectivists, believe that "reality" is separate from our own beliefs - gravity, for example, will always exist regardless of whether anyone believes in it or not.

The whole thing ties rather neatly into that New Agey paradox known as the Law of Attraction, as well. If we think about something and believe in it strongly enough, does that make it real? And by contrast, if we truly and completely disbelieve in something, does it cease to exist?

__________________Inflexible soldiers cannot win a victory, and the hardest trees are readiest for an axe to chop them down. Tough guys sink to the bottom, while flexible people rise to the top.

That's my philosophy exactly, Pat! On a related note, the early Idealists conducted studies in which a ball rolled down a slope at a random time, with nobody present to watch it. It still rolled down the hill. When questioned as to why gravity didn't stop existing when he wasn't watching it, the Idealist said for the same reason the world didn't stop existing when we closed our eyes - namely, more people in the world are seeing and believing at any one time than people who aren't. In another study, some Idealists cited that God observes everything, and He is, in a sense, the ultimate believer.

Despite everything, I'm more on the side of the Idealists here than that of the Objectivists. I definitely believe that thoughts affect our reality, but our reality is also affected by the thoughts of everyone else. Thus, even if I firmly stopped believing in gravity, it wouldn't change anything for me because everyone else I associate with would believe otherwise.

__________________Inflexible soldiers cannot win a victory, and the hardest trees are readiest for an axe to chop them down. Tough guys sink to the bottom, while flexible people rise to the top.